6 Important Email Marketing Statistics

Email marketing statistics tell some very different stories than you might think at first glance. It’s crucial to your success that you 1) learn the difference between all of the statistics, 2) track all of your email campaigns to compare results and make improvements and 3) figure out which statistics are most accurate and applicable to use on your campaigns.

6 Important Email Marketing Statistics

1. Open Rate – The open rate is the number of people who opened up your email. This statistic is easily jumbled up. To begin with, the way preview panes are viewed as opens or not isn’t consistent. Also important is that open rates are based off tiny 1×1 pixel images embedded into your messages. Anybody on your list who has images turned off on their email therefore does not get counted as an open. It’s useful as a comparison between your campaigns, but not as an end-all-be-all statistic.

2. Click Through Rate - The click through rate, or CTR, may be the most valuable of all of the email marketing statistics. Your company sends out email campaigns for a reason, usually to get somebody to visit your website and then usually take some further action. The CTR for an email tells you how many people clicked through on any of your links. You can compare the effectiveness of different calls to action within the same message or in separate campaigns and you can see how many people liked your email enough to take the next step.

3. Bounces – The dreaded bounce category. A bounce is when an email you send out never reaches its final destination. You may have an incorrect email address, and in some instances some mailboxes may be full or temporarily blocked for various reasons. You can use the bounce rate to judge how strong the quality of your list is. The lower your bounce rate is, the stronger the list is. Remember, quality counts more than quantity when list building.

4. Conversion Rate - The conversion rate takes the idea of the CTR one step forward. Your conversion rate is the actual percentage of people who received the email and completed the full action you wanted them to take. More than just clicking on a link, they made a purchase or they signed up for something or took any kind of quantifiable action that you requested for. You may have to compute this one on your own if your sales and email systems aren’t integrated. You can place referral tracking IDS within your email links so that when somebody makes a sale after reading an email, you know where it came from.

5. Forwards - The forward statistic is a useful tool to see how many of your list members passed on your message to somebody else. If you see a lot of forwards, you are providing useful and informative content that people enjoy enough to share with one of their own acquaintances. Some industries won’t ever see a lot of forwards, especially with business to business email marketing. Messages from other industries though may lend themselves quite well to being passed along.

6. Deliverability­­ – Deliverability is a statistic usually looked at not on the scale of an individual company but as an overall trend in terms of different businesses, industries and email service providers. It’s one of the email marketing statistics that can be used to help benchmark the effectiveness and overall movement of this communication medium from industry to industry and provider to provider.

These 6 important email marketing statistics should help give you a much more lucid understanding of the success of your email campaigns.

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